manually installing MSDOS...

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jules Richardson Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 4:36 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: manually installing MSDOS... Another DOS question! :) I've got a laptop that currently has Win2k and Debian Linux on it, along with a small FAT partition (it's actually FAT32 currently, but I can change that easily enough) I want to put MSDOS on the FAT partition and triple-boot the machine - but the laptop has no floppy drive on it, so I can't just boot from a DOS floppy and run SYS that way. So is there a way of putting the necessary files on there from either Windows or Linux such that DOS will boot? Can't remember how MSDOS does it's boot process now, but I assume that certain files (io.sys for one) need to be in certain locations on the FAT partition or something? At one point I would have known how to do this, but the info's long since fallen out of my brain... (Currently I'm booting Debian / Win2k from Grub - it should handle booting MSDOS too though). Before I shoot myself in the foot, are there any other gotchas (like MSDOS needing to be the first partition on the drive or anything nuts like that)? The FAT partition is about 2GB into the disk - I seem to recall that a FAT partition can't be more than 2GB in size, but presumably providing the BIOS can see the whole disk DOS won't care about the offset to the start of the partition? (All I actually want to do is put Slackware Linux on the machine there in place of Debian, but the CDROM drive's too flakey to boot from. If I can get MSDOS on there by copying from a remote machine then I can boot the Slackware installer from MSDOS and then install the rest of Slackware across the network - talk about complicated!!) Ok, long email - will shut up now! :-) cheers Jules